Lin Aojie’s “If You Throw Enough Mud at the Wall, None of It Will Stick”
By Andrew Stooke
LIN AOJIE, Starbucks Left, 2015, stills from single-channel video: 3 min 37 sec. Courtesy the artist and A+ Contemporary, Shanghai.
The lights are turned off at the entrance of Shanghai’s A+ Contemporary, giving the impression that there is no exhibition. In the dim galleries, it feels as though business is winding down with just a few monitors left behind; everything else has already been removed. This is the theatrical and immersive setting of Guangzhou-based Lin Aojie’s “If You Throw Enough Mud at the Wall, None of It Will Stick.”
Navigating through the galleries in the dark can be just a little uncomfortable, and it is a similar sense of aggravation that Lin expresses in several of the works: annoyance with the disjuncture between art and capitalism, annoyance with an artist’s social responsibilities, even frustration with his own ambition. Lin wants change but is often thwarted by finding himself caught out by intractable situations.
In Starbucks Left (2015), for example, a terse video comprising a sequence of captioned still images, mild vexation at the ubiquitous café is ironically expressed by conceiving it as a hub for radical ferment. “Tomorrow is a festival of the future, the day after tomorrow is the end of the world,” reads one caption, accompanying a slightly blurred image of the Starbucks logo. Lin’s oblique critique proposes the coffee house to be a conflicted site; from the outset, their social environment facilitates the expansion of market capitalism, shrouding it in genial comfort. Starbucks continues to promote a sense of a shared community, it deploys marketing vocabulary and branding to distract from its financial interests.
Dissatisfaction is also considered in another video work, You Left Me Off Your List Part 1 (2017), which features the artist and a gallery representative in conversation. In the work, Lin presents the director with a list, on which he says he has crossed out the names of artists represented by the gallery that he doesn’t like. The sequence concludes with the artist’s suggestion, “I don’t know if your boss would agree about giving up on some of these folk.” In the complimentary work, You Left Me Off Your List Part 2 (2017) it is now the gallery director’s turn to speak, while Lin listens. She explains that she looks mainly toward an artist’s future, “Doing shows grows potential.” Both video sequences are brief. The teacher from the gallery patiently corrects the neophyte artist.
LIN AOJIE, You Left Me Off Your List Part 1, 2017, stills from single-channel video: 2 min 18 sec. Courtesy the artist and A+ Contemporary, Shanghai.
LIN AOJIE, You Left Me Off Your List Part 2, 2017, stills from single-channel video: 2 min 18 sec. Courtesy the artist and A+ Contemporary, Shanghai.
Elsewhere, Lin’s work deconstructs the process of exhibition-making. In Design Sketch (2017), a series of interior images of the gallery’s space is posted in the gallery’s office, beyond exhibition space normally seen by the public. However, by digitally drawing A+ Contemporary’s sleek gallery space by hand in a weak, spindly cartoon manner, the artist challenges the thought behind the gallery’s handsome design. As with the ironic swipe in Starbucks Left, Lin’s commentary through Design Sketch is also articulated in its presentation strategy. However, despite moving the work’s placement away from the main exhibition space, the office does not provide sufficient distance to turn it into an institutional critique.
LIN AOJIE, Self-Introduction, 2017, still from single-channel video: 20 min. Courtesy the artist and A+ Contemporary, Shanghai.
In the same casual framework is the autobiographical Self-Introduction (2016), revealing the artist’s personal portfolio of artworks and projects. Informal to the point of naïve impertinence, the sequence takes the form of an extended, unedited, hand-drawn animation on an iPad. It is excruciating to watch as one rudimentary drawing follows another, with titles that are slowly written out in Chinese, then English, often with errors that are undone and corrected, suggesting a detail that could have been edited out. The conflict of an artist’s public image and integrity reach a denouement in Battle (2017), a video with music but no image that is presented on a large monitor in the main gallery space. Similar to a subtitle at the bottom of the screen, a line of text at the end of the video describes Lin’s struggle as an artist: “I need my art to be what nobody else can do . . . And when I put it up, woohaa!”
American literary critic Fredric Jameson once suggested that, “It is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism.” Lin Aojie might say that it is also easier to imagine an end to artistic authenticity than an end to the trade in art, or an end to discussion than an end to Starbucks.
Lin Aojie’s “If You Throw Enough Mud at the Wall, None of It Will Stick” is on view at A+ Contemporary, Shanghai, until May 7, 2017.
